Ordnance Survey Called in to Map UK Towns for 5G

Our Ordnance Survey mappers have been chosen to lead a team feeding data to future 5G networks, with the hope being that ultra-detailed maps of towns will give planners and mobile providers a better idea of where to place their masts so we can all have 5G, all of the time.

The work's starting in Bournemouth, where a high resolution digital version of the city is to be created by the OS with help from the 5G Innovation Centre and the Met Office, giving hope to locals that their current flaky 3G connections might magically be transformed into the world's first 5G heaven. Which is unlikely, but they need hope.

Ordnance Survey's commercial director Andrew Loveless said: "The purpose is to deploy 5G quickly and efficiently. Linking OS data to spectrum information and meteorological data will deliver faster speeds and better coverage to connected devices, all the while helping keep rollout costs to a minimum."

And if it works in Bournemouth it will somehow be "scaled up" to work across the entire UK, they hope, and there's a chance that the technology could be sold to other cities to help them patch their network coverage together too. We could, as a nation, be good at making a thing again. [Ordnance Survey via BBC]